Claire-Louise Bennett: Pond

pond

The latest addition to my website is Claire-Louise Bennett‘s Pond. This book is subtitled Stories but it is really a novel, as it tells the tale of the unnamed narrator and her three years living in a (fairly) remote cottage in rural Ireland. We learn that she likes nature but not in a too romantic way. She has affairs, but really only finds men attractive and desirable when she is drunk which, as she tells us, is quite a lot of the time. She struggles a bit with life, not always sure what she is doing, lacking organisational and planning skills and not really fitting in anywhere, and not really wanting to. What makes this novel is the skilful writing and the way the narrator examines herself or reveals herself to be a woman who is not quite at one with the world, even as she more or less gets by.

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